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Mapless Globe Plays the Sounds of the Earth When You Spin It

Yuri Suzuki has been traveling the world, using a dictaphone to collect local sounds of different countries since 2009. With these audio field notes, he’s turned a globe into a record that plays these sounds when it spins for a 30-minute audio tour of the world called “The Sound of the Earth.” The artist engraved…

Laser Cutting Table For Amateurs Slices What You Sketch

In the not-too-distant future home manufacturing will be as commonplace as home printing. Devices like the Makerbot will fuel the revolution, but only when they become as easy to use as this Constructable that precisely cuts materials based on doodles made with a laser pointer. https://gizmodo.com/the-makerbot-replicator-2-prints-a-bigger-more-detaile-5944706 Users don’t have to master computer-aided design software in…

The Placebo Effect May Be Genetic

The placebo effect seems to make little sense: get ill, take a dummy pill, and you’ll recover in much the same way as someone taking real drugs. While there have been many theories bandied about over the years to explain how it works, new evidence suggests that it may be genetic. https://gizmodo.com/we-could-have-evolved-the-placebo-effect-to-save-energy-5940942 A team of…

Why do humans and cats grow extra fingers?

Six fingers! It happens sometimes — especially to a few choice species, including humans. It’s called polydactyly. And there’s an amazing story behind how we tracked down the reason people, cats, and flies seem to grow extra digits. Inigo Montoya, the most quoted fantasy character in history, strode through both the book and the movie…

The Lowly Button Gets a Brilliant Upgrade

There should be a special Nobel Prize set aside for geniuses who find ways to improve the simplest things in life. And this year’s award would go to Shapeways user OliveBird, whose Button 2.0 turns any shirt into a convenient headphone wrangler. It’s not to say that the traditional button design isn’t useful. It’s just…

Did we just find out huge plot points from Iron Man 3 and Thor: The Dark World?

Doctor Who is headed deeper inside the TARDIS than we’ve ever gone before. Transformers 4 might feature a major action star… well, Mark Wahlberg, at any rate. BBC America’s clone drama Orphan Black is officially happening. Plus videos for The Hobbit and Cloud Atlas! Spoilers from here on out! Top image from Cloud Atlas. Iron…

Lady Gaga Has an Entire Genus of Plants Named After Her

When scientists make a discovery, they often get first dibs on how it should be named or referred to. Usually they’ll—rather arrogantly—choose their own name, but not a team of researchers from Duke University: instead, they chose Lady Gaga’s. As a result, Lady Gaga now has 19 different species of a newly discovered fern genus…

Dive Right Into the Largest Ever Image of Our Galaxy’s Centre

You are looking at more than 84 million stars, the largest ever catalogue of the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way. Astronomers at the Paranal Observatory in Cerro Paranal, Chile, stitched the 9 gigapixels of the original image from thousands of individual infrared pictures.You can see the full, zoomable version here. It contains more…

New York Has Run Out of Brownstone

Brownstones are an iconic part of the New York landscape, as defining a feature as the yellow cabs on the street or the towering office blocks that inhabit Manhattan. But times are changing, and the city’s finally run out of its famed building material. The New York Times reports that the last remaining brownstone quarry,…

EU Antitrust Commission Charges Microsoft Over Browser Selection

An EU antitrust commission is charging Microsoft: it didn’t offer browser choices in Win7. Fines to be decided. [Europa]

These Ridiculous Cell Phone Insurance Claims Are Hilarious

Deciding on whether to take out cell phone insurance is a tricky issue: it costs a heap, but it could save a stack of cash when you drop your smartphone onto bare concrete. Chances are, though, if you do ever make a claim, it will never be as ridiculous as any of these. A UK-based…

Scientists Promise Ten Times More Bandwidth With No New Hardware

A team of researchers promises it can increase wireless bandwidth by an order or magnitude, without any new hardware whatsoever. All that’s required, it claims, is a little extra math. Technology Review reports that the scientists have been developing algebraic techniques to eliminate the task of resending dropped packets of data—something that really clogs up…

Hacking a Single Radio System to Work With Wi-Fi, 3G and Bluetooth

Zap-happy channel-surfers could soon control a lot more than cable TV from their remotes. Michael Ossmann, co-founder of Great Scott Gadgets, is developing HackRF, a software-defined radio (SDR) that lets you switch between radio frequencies on the fly. Most wireless gadgets, like the 3G antenna in a phone, operate using a fixed radio frequency band.…

Boeing’s New Missile Remotely Disables Computers as It Flies By

This is CHAMP: Boeing’s new missile otherwise known as the Counter-electronics High-powered Microwave Advanced Missile Project. It automatically disables PCs and other electronic devices as it soars through the skies, using a burst of powerful radio waves—and it was successfully tested last week. The CHAMP tests took place in the Western Utah Desert on October…

Amazon continues its push for world domination, rolling out the Kindle Store, Paperwhite and Fire in Japan. [Amazon]

13 People Who Think the iPad Mini Is Actually Really Cheap

Though we think the iPad Mini seems crazy expensive compared to the Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire HD, some people out there actually think the iPad Mini is cheap! Related: I need more rich friends. https://gizmodo.com/the-ipad-mini-seems-crazy-expensive-5954269 The oddness of the $330 price tag aside, when the competition can undercut your price by over a hundred…

Nikon 1 V2: An Interchangeable-Lens Camera For Clueless Photographers (And No One Else)

The Nikon 1 V2 is a total overhaul of its predecessor. The hope is that the higher-resolution sensor, bigger body, and amateur-friendly features will turn a legion of aspiring beginners into lens-swapping, accessory-toting photographers. We think? Otherwise this camera makes no sense. When Nikon waded into the mirrorless, interchangeable-lens camera market last year with its…

The Stoner Channel: Arcane Dangers, Antique Synthesizers, and Albert Kings

Arcane – Bastien Belvaux This is going to blow your mind. Arcane was created by Bastien Belvaux as his Ecole des Métiers du Cinéma d’Animation graduation project and needs to be turned into a feature length, like, now. Herbie Hancock Blows School Kids’ Minds with the Awesome Power of Synthesized Music Legendary jazz keyboardist Herbie…

The 25 Most Popular Passwords of 2012

Though I had hoped that we, as people, would have improved our passwords by now, it turns out that we, as people, are still unimaginative and so very lazy. Just take a look at the most popular (read: the worst) passwords of 2012. They’re terribly predictable. The rankings were created by SplashData who gathered the…

Can This Girl Find Love on a Coding Website?

It’s not totally unlike online dating but Noriko Higashi, a programmer at a social gaming company, posted a request for a boyfriend on GitHub, the social coding platform, outlining what she wants in a partner. If you can code, you have a chance at love. Bonus points for running your own server. BetaBeat dug up…